APPLYING THE HEAT INTEGRATION IN ORDER TO ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTANTS MINIMIZATION IN DISTILLATION COLUMNS

Due to the close relationship between the energy and environmental problems, recovering technology andoptimizing energy consumption have a major role in environment protection by minimization theatmospheric pollutants such as sox, cox, nox. this minimization may decrease the greenhouse effect,and the ozone layer destruction. on the other hand, optimization of energy consumption and itsrecovering may minimize the water and hot oil consumption at the heat exchangers (reboilers andcondensers) in petroleum distillation columns, specially. the present research has been performed aboutthe kerosene pre-fractionation unit of one of the country's oil refineries. this system includes twodistillation columns with a simple arrangement. considering that the distillation section consumes a greatdeal of energy in the chemical and petroleum industries, hence studying the ways in which we maydecrease this consumption is of great importance. one of these retrofit solutions is the heat integration,which is going to be presented in this research with a different idea from the other previous methods. thismethod makes it possible to add a shell and tube heat exchanger for performing a part of condensationand evaporation operation which can decrease the heat duties of reboilers and one of the condensers. tothis end , the distillation columns were studied in the process and then the proposed model of columnsarrangement were simulated by heat integration with all input and output streams using the aspen plussoftware, version 11.1 and the rad frac model in this software. the result has showed itself as a save of14.26%, 10.86% and 14.26% in energy, water and hot oil consumption, respectively. on the other handthis system will decrease emission of so2 and co2 to atmosphere, 28 kg/h and 837 kg/h, respectively.